Pharma’s New Game: The 279th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Many topics today! First: FDA tentatively approves Moderna’s new mRNA shot for Covid. What? And also why? Bret has six main points, which include discussion of mucosal immunity, IgG4, auto-immunity, long-term consequences, statistical tricks, and homeopathy. Then: how do we know what is true, and how can we avoid jumping to conclusions when triggered by language or circumstances that seem familiar and frustrating?...As explored through the story of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who has a Disor...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number.
It's got to be 276?
No.
No.
It's 113?
Yes.
279.
279.
Of course it's 279.
That makes sense given what the last one was.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
In the interest of full disclosure to our audience, we try to maintain a perfectly clean record of honesty with them.
And I feel compelled to alert them that this shirt has a stain on it, which you cannot see because it's on the back.
I must have leaned to get something and I can't get the stain out, but it occurred to me I can still podcast in it.
So anyway, you've been warned.
You're giving me that look.
I'm just expecting it's now on you to keep talking.
Oh, it is on me to keep talking.
All right.
Well, let's see.
It's early June, and it wasn't the last time we gathered here.
Okay, thanks for being here, everyone.
Join us on Locals.
We've got a watch party going on there, and we've got a number of topical topics, but timely topics.
None of which, unfortunately, are deeply, deeply science-y.
I had something that I want to talk about, and we just didn't have time to get to it.
So I hope that we get back to at least doing something that is explicitly non-politically valenced science in every single episode, but it's not going to happen today.
I actually think there's a strong argument for my primary topic here.
Non-politically valenced science.
Let's put it this way.
We're going to use science as an antidote.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about, too.
But it just gets tiresome.
It's not what most people want to be thinking about.
What is the angle about which people are arguing as opposed to what is true?
And let's move from there.
So we will get into things like the FDA approval of the new Moderna COVID Vax.
And revelations that were obvious to everyone who was thinking about it this week that Amain Khalif, the Algerian boxer, is yes male.
And downstream of that, I want to talk about some of how it is that people jump to conclusions and how it is that we understand what we know to be true.
basically an epistemological understanding of the universe as viewed through Twitter.
Yeah, I have a couple of things.
I want to take this opportunity to update people on Richard Dawkins' state of mind, which he helped us with this morning.
I think there is something important that I believe needs to be said about the Glenn Greenwald situation, and the primary focus is going to be what you should think of the new Moderna.
MRNA shots.
Yeah, we already said that.
Yeah.
Okay, let's go.
Join us on Locals, and we have three sponsors at the top of the hour, as always.
Carefully chosen, if we are reading ads here on Dark Horse, you can be assured that we actually truly vouch for these products or services, starting off right away with a Our final sponsor.
No, that's not helpful.
I'm missing one of the ads.
Somehow I have two of the ads.
I'm gonna read the one and then you will cover while I find the second one.
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Okay, so I'm going to cover while Heather is dredging up the second ad.
I totally have it.
You got it.
Go for it.
Man, I was going to explain that insurance has a fatal flaw when it is a for-profit business.
That fatal flaw, it's supposed to provide a risk pool in which we all agree that we don't want to be the unlucky one who gets wiped out over a medical misfortune.
We would rather pay something in that we don't recover in order that when we are the ones who face the medical misfortune that would wipe us out.
All of the other people who have paid in and have been luckier covered that shortfall.
The problem is, if it's a for-profit insurance model business, the ideal way to make that profit is to uninsure the people who need it most and to insure those people who are least likely to need it, which unbalances the risk pool so it becomes a predatory force.
And in any case, CrowdHealth does a marvelous job of returning us to a risk pool model.
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So far, I expect it to continue to be fantastic for us.
But it was scary to leave the land of insurance.
But I think that new model has been well vindicated by our experience.
Exactly.
Any move away from the familiar can be, tends to be, if you're honest with yourself, at least at some level, scary.
Even if you know that what, And in this case, the fears were unwarranted.
Yeah.
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Prebiotics, sorry.
I stopped reading and went on autopilot.
I've been there.
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Anyway, theirs, Are we doing that with all three syllable words?
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can we make a deal that in the future when you read for Armora yes that you will pause after the word seal I will bark like a seal and then you can go back to reading because when we don't do it that way Some of the audience can hear the ghost bark.
Probably some of them can, yes.
Those who, with deep theory of mind that, unfortunate for them, covers me, yes, they can hear the barking that I hear in my head.
So you should deep theory of mind back on them.
Be like, okay, my barking has been heard.
Some of the tension is relieved.
That's quite meta.
I'm going to think about whether or not that would work, and maybe I'll try.
But otherwise, we're going to pause at seal.
Get it out.
I don't think they have paws.
It's flippers.
You're right.
They have claws, though.
Yeah.
Does our audience know that seal flippers have claws sticking out at the top?
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They look like cactus paddles, but except with spines all over.
It's just the spines at the end.
Correct.
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I think we have digressed.
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I think that's what you would say.
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With regard to swim.
Yes.
Thank you.
We should maybe come back to it on a different episode, but I'm hearing you read that and thinking about, like, you know, choose the mattress suited to your preferences, and that's wonderful in one way, but I think sleep and the surfaces on which we sleep have been like so much else in modernity, been too market-driven to the Immediate preferences of the consumer.
And specifically, the option that is mentioned in this particular product line, as it would be for any mattresses, is do you prefer a hard or soft mattress?
And while I have not looked into it recently, I think there is abundant evidence.
That very soft mattresses are bad for you.
That other than relieving pressure on a particular thing after a particular injury or while healing, and maybe even not then, in general, you don't want to be sinking into your mattress deeply, even though, especially under some circumstances, it can feel really delightful.
Yeah, and if you think about it, I've always wanted somebody to do a review of what is known about ancestral sleeping surfaces.
But if you think about what the options would have been, it's very hard to come up with anything that our ancestors would have used that is really soft in the way that a very soft mattress is.
Yeah, I mean, straw, which was But that's not that soft if you put But I am reminded, and I don't think I have it, but let me just see if I do, of a picture that you took in Odovalo in Ecuador of a vendor, someone who had traveled, someone who had probably walked.
So Odovalo is the...
And this, I think it was a woman, had walked with just like all of her bags, and they were filled with hard and oblong-looking things with lots of angles.
And she was asleep on top of them.
And she was, you know, not spread out nicely, but sort of, you know, seated and sort of, you know, protecting her stuff so that she would notice if someone tried to steal from her.
And she looked okay.
And for us, it reminded us of, okay, actually, there will have been so many circumstances in which people slept historically and prehistorically, and mostly it worked out.
Yeah, mostly it worked out.
Now, I wonder, as you know, I sleep face down almost always, which I think probably wouldn't be all that likely to work.
on an ancestral surface.
So I wonder if...
Now, when you say face down, Yeah, my neck is turned.
And so, you know, I sleep on my stomach.
Yeah.
But the problem is if the mattress is hard, one just notices every rib.
And so I'm wondering if...
Anyway, here we are.
Here we are.
Here we are.
All right.
Well, where should we start?
I think you wanted to start with the Moderna Vax approval by FDA.
All right.
Let's start there.
Jen, do you want to...
Actually, before you put anything up, I want people to track this story a little differently than one might normally.
Because in thinking about this story, the story is about the announcement that was made.
And then Kennedy clarified the announcement about the preliminary approval of a new mRNA-based vaccine from Moderna, which has a small fraction of the concentration of the original Moderna COVID shot.
Well, that's so I think you just jumped to the thing that I want to talk about here.
And I don't know that what you just said is true, given what Kennedy has said specifically.
Okay, well, let's put that claim aside.
Let us say, what I want people to be tracking here is both what has been announced, what we've been told about what it means, but more importantly, I think that this story is a powerful demonstration.
of two things.
One is the value of first principles thinking, because I believe that we can do a lot with not very much to go on here with respect to understanding what might be taking place, why it might be taking place, and what the implications might be for human health and well-being.
And two is that effectively our longtime viewers and listeners have invested in a Model that we have built up piece by piece over the course of the pandemic and the post-pandemic, where we've come to understand a great many things and talked about them at length.
And those things now can be put together and allow us to understand at a much greater level of depth what we're being told that we would otherwise effectively have to take on face value or reject because we don't take anything on face value.
Okay, given all of that.
Then maybe it makes sense to show Moderna's press release before moving to Kennedy's response to the press release, which, absent the thing he was responding to, doesn't make a lot of sense.
So you can show my screen here.
This is Moderna, posted May 31st, 2025, which they also tweeted about, which is how I ran into it.
Moderna receives U.S. FDA approval for COVID-19 vaccine MNEX spike.
I'm just gonna read a couple sentences here.
The first is And they've given it the number 1283.
And we're in a 1283.
A new vaccine against COVID-19 for use in all adults 65 and older, as well as individuals aged 12 to 64 years old with at least one or more underlying risk factor as defined by the CDC.
And then the next, the only other two sentences I want to share from their press release are third paragraph.
The FDA's approval of MNEX spike is based on results from a randomized, observer-blind, active-controlled, Phase III clinical trial, which enrolled approximately 11,400 participants aged 12 years and older.
The primary efficacy objective in the study was to demonstrate the non-inferior vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 starting 14 days after MNEC spike, compared to that after the comparator vaccine, mRNA-1273, spike vax, Moderna's original COVID-19 vaccine.
So let's just, and I'm going to read one more sentence here, but let's just pause for a second.
The new one is 1283.
The original one was 1273.
Did I get those two numbers right?
The old one was 1273.
And what they did in the clinical trial, which was the basis for the approval by the FDA, was compare the new one to the old one.
And what we hear from Kennedy is that they promised to do an actual placebo-controlled trial, which is not what they've done here.
So again, 1273 is the original, 1283 is the new one.
They say participants received either a 10-microgram dose of 1283, the new one, or a 50-microgram dose of 1273, the old one.
1283, the new one, showed a 9.3% higher relative vaccine efficacy compared to 1273, the old one, in individuals aged 12 years and older, and in a descriptive subgroup analysis, a 13.5% higher RVE.
And adults age 65 and older.
So that's what I saw before we heard from Kennedy, and I thought it interesting that in units that are still vague, as we were talking about yesterday, it's vaccine goo.
And, you know, 12 micrograms of vaccine goo of the new vaccine versus 50 micrograms of vaccine goo of the old stuff.
Oh, even, even, If vaccine goo in 1273 is equivalent to vaccine goo in 1283, and we don't know because all we're told is 10 micrograms, 50 micrograms, but what is in it?
If it's not the same stuff that's in it, which presumably it's not, then those numbers actually can't be compared in that way.
Right.
Okay.
Well, that's all very good.
And I think it is an even more powerful demonstration of the first principles approach here than I realized even a few minutes ago.
So the question is how to move into this.
Let's talk about Kennedy's tweet here first.
All right.
So this is Secretary Kennedy from his official account, who says, I want to address those who have anxieties about US FDA's limited approval of a new mRNA COVID vaccine for high risk populations.
Moderna has agreed to a true placebo controlled trial of the new vaccine, which is similar to the existing mRNA vaccine, but uses a smaller protein.
So that's where...
It's a collective noun versus an individual noun issue.
It's a fewer versus less issue.
Well, if I read that correctly, and assuming everything is taken at face value, a smaller protein, it's the same number of proteins.
But the subunit is smaller.
In which case, in which case, then 10 micrograms versus 50 micrograms doesn't bring you any benefit.
Well, no.
It does because these things are not protein-based.
So the protein is going to be the product of the translation that happens in the cell.
So the transcripts are, I believe, unless the transcripts are...
It's very hard to compare them without knowing how long the transcript is.
And it's impossible to tell from this, but the language here is it uses a smaller protein.
Now, maybe that means the product is, but that's not what it's written here.
It triggers the production of a smaller protein is how I take this.
But both with this and the Moderna press release, there is enough ambiguity, and I don't expect in Kennedy's case that's intentional.
In Moderna's case, I wonder.
But you can't actually tell what the benefit or reason for using a fifth dose might be.
Right.
Now we will come back to what that reason might be.
I will point out, Yeah, we'll come back.
We'll take the second paragraph of the tweet.
The fact that this tweet from Kennedy says the mRNA vaccine but uses a smaller protein, and that that is in fact incredibly sloppy language for a vaccine that doesn't include the protein at all, does suggest, as one might imagine, that this is not Kennedy writing, because Kennedy actually is...
And so one would expect him to have phrased that carefully.
It's not surprising that somebody else is manning his account, but it does suggest that whoever is manning his account isn't really up to speed on what we're talking about.
And that raises concerns.
In and of itself, because we in the public are being told something about a product that people will take, and the cover story is kind of thin.
Okay, so picking up the second paragraph of Kennedy's tweet, he says, the FDA will monitor and collect data throughout the trial for every adverse outcome, not just a table list of expected outcomes.
FDA will scrutinize every aspect of the trial.
We will deliver on our promise to use gold standard science and common sense.
Okay, now I gotta tell ya, this puts me in a bind.
I am supportive of Kennedy, and I have defended Kennedy where he has made steps that look incomplete and are causing exasperation in the medical freedom movement.
People may have seen Mary Talley Bowden tweet about an exchange that she and I had.
She called it a debate.
It was not a debate.
I was administering a panel that she was on.
Had she and I been in a debate, she would have gotten a very different response.
But nonetheless, let's play this clip of Mary Talley Bowden and my exchange here.
Yeah, if we could get some people with very big microphones to speak up.
And, you know, courage is contagious.
But yeah, if Robert Kennedy if you're listening now's the time please but I will say in in Kennedy's defense he is now in a Yeah, no, you gotta.
Well, I'm sorry, I'm gonna do it anyway.
The fact is, he has been drafted into a game none of us know how to play.
And it's a very difficult game, and he is undoubtedly tormented by having to...
25,000 a day.
Yeah, but...
There's just no excuse.
But I will tell you, as of today, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the administration is not going to recommend...
It says, A, we are succeeding.
B, we haven't been abandoned.
And C, the Trump administration is coming around, which is something that I was told at the beginning would not happen.
So I don't like waiting either, and I don't like the idea that every day we wait that more people are going to be injected.
Brought into the ranks of the vaccine injured.
I don't like it any better than you do, but I know that in the end, the important thing is that we staunch the bleeding.
My thing is, though, what is the harm in putting the pressure on them as intensely as we can?
I mean, that doesn't do any harm.
Giving them this, yes, we trust you.
We'll be quiet.
I just don't think it's...
I think we just press them.
I mean, what's the...
The downside of that is that the Trump administration digs in its heels and doesn't respond at all.
Well, you think they'll fire Kennedy?
Well, I think Kennedy needs support or he's dead in the water.
All right.
So I think actually, you know, Mary tweeted that out.
I think she thinks it makes her point clearly.
I think it actually makes both of our points clear.
In her tweet of it, she said, or she implied that I had said that we needed to trust the process or something like this, which is not something that I said.
But there is a question.
We've got Kennedy, who understands the predicament the public is in and understands the science behind this.
Very well, and therefore understands the harm that is being done, why and how, and how it came to be, as well as anyone on earth.
He's written books, you can read them, they are exhaustive.
So the question is, now that he is in a position that is powerful, in a position to do something on behalf of the public, what are we to do about the fact that he is Not doing the obviously right thing.
The shots should obviously never have been on the market, which means they should obviously be pulled off the market before they're given to anybody else.
That's straightforward.
And yet, we are going through this process.
We are, whatever, five months into the Trump administration.
And, you know, we're making progress.
They are being pulled from the childhood vaccine schedule, which has important implications.
It's slow going, and at the same time, we now have an announcement of a new Moderna mRNA shot, and that is the opposite of progress.
Now, I want to go into the depth of what this new shot is about, why this is being presented this way, but let me just say, I am very much for empowering and emboldening Kennedy and those on his team that are trying to do Right by the public.
I find this announcement hard to defend, and I'm not saying, obviously this shot has been in the works for some time, so let's just agree that those of us in the public who are not intimately familiar with FDA approval are not in a position to say what tools Kennedy does and does not have at his disposal with respect to something like this.
Personal opinion, the FDA is there to serve us in the public and not there to serve drug manufacturers, but we should all agree that at some level, if you want people to be able to manufacture good drugs, then they have to have a system that is not arbitrary with respect to what they do.
They have to meet standards that we set.
And if they meet those standards, things have to progress.
And so as much as I see Moderna, Pfizer, and the entire MRNA industry as beyond criminally negligent and therefore not entitled to anything, these many of these people should
Not only is he making progress against the entrenched pharma industry, But he's making progress in light of an administration that he works with that has not been open to this line of inquiry.
So there's lots of evidence of progress.
But what are we to do with the Moderna announcement of this new reduced concentration or reduced size dosage vaccine?
And so here's where we are going to get to.
The demonstration of the power of a first principles thinking and b the model that we here on Dark Horse have Mm-hmm.
for as these things are brought to market.
Okay, so first thing is, We can deduce from Kennedy's tweet about this that there is no change whatsoever in the fact that it will be Moderna running its own test of its vaccine.
That ought to frighten people because what we've seen Throughout the pandemic is that pharma is exquisitely capable of gaming the system by creating false impressions of efficacy and false impressions of safety.
That the number of games that have been played with respect to the COVID so-called vaccines, including the redefinition of the term vaccine in order to bring these things into a rubric where they have special rights and immunities, suggests that you're dealing with Basically, virtuoso scammers.
And it breaks the rule of blindness.
I feel like, was it Tess Lurie's?
Someone early-ish in COVID was talking about, I feel like, the levels of blind that you can have in a trial.
Yep.
And the idea that the manufacturer with the vested interest in one outcome should be not just...
Even if the protocol makes sense and they follow it to the letter behind the scenes, if they're in control of it, they could be effectively breaking blindness at other levels such that you get that.
They get the result that they want.
Yes.
In fact, there are formal tricks for breaking blindness.
You know, the reaching a target of efficacy that causes you to morally be obligated to vaccinate your control group.
Well, but like I said, like even if the protocol is actually good, even if the protocol is awesome and they follow it strictly.
Yes, they can cheat.
And this brings us to the first two things that longtime viewers and listeners will be aware of that we can see already here.
One of them is the game that pharma plays by using things that are not placebos as if they were placebos based on.
So the idea of testing this new vaccine against an old vaccine allows for all kinds of trickery rather than testing the new vaccine against, you know, a saline shot and seeing whether the net impact is positive for the patient, which is the only thing that you should care about.
So, I mean, as you see in the press release.
The clinical trial that got them to FDA approval is exactly comparing this version to their original version.
And Kennedy specifies they're going to be using placebo.
But to points that we have made recently on Dark Horse, placebo doesn't always mean placebo.
So presumably they aren't, they can't be allowed to compare it to their previous vaccine.
But if they include any of the excipients, any of the including the adjuvants in a standard vaccine, Or in their previous vaccine, then it's not a true placebo, and the results don't mean anything.
Yeah, I don't mean to imply, obviously Kennedy says they will be using a true placebo here, and maybe it will even be just an actual placebo, you know, a saline shot or something like that.
But in order to get here, that press release says this is on the basis that this shot, which we have tested for efficacy in this large study, has shown that it is superior to the original shot.
So they're using a stepping stone method.
Now, that's one thing.
Here's another thing, which is implied here between mostly in Kennedy's tweet.
But who's doing the test?
Still Moderna.
What does that mean?
Well, here's another place that we've covered.
One of the ways in which pharma games the system by doing their own tests.
Pharma hires labs to run tests for it.
Which means that there is an industry you can't see that is contractors who will run an experiment for a corporation who's trying to get a shot approved.
Okay, now what does that mean?
Imagine that there are 10 of these contractors.
They know exactly what it is that their employer wants.
The person who has contracted them wants efficacy to be demonstrated.
They want safety to be demonstrated.
They want harms buried.
So these contractors are in competition with each other.
And a contractor who ran tests without cheating would lose in competition to one that delivered the results that its parent company wanted.
So there's effectively a laundering operation.
Right?
Moderna can have its fingerprints off of the cheating, and it can depend on some contractor whose name we don't know to do the cheating for it.
And if cheating ever comes to light as well, that's the contractor.
So there's a built-in system.
There's no blindness.
The contractor is not blind to the interests of those who have hired it.
Right?
So that's probably the biggest unblinding of all.
And it's hidden in plain sight right here.
Okay.
Could there be a way for the contractor to be blind, in fact?
Yeah.
In the case of testing efficacy of a new vaccine that is heading towards market if it passes.
The obvious way to do it is for the FDA to be the contractor and for it to reward the The whole thing is broken if you're running your own freaking test and you have a perverse incentive and the ability to hire subcontractors is just one of the many ways
that the system is pre-gamed.
But the problem with the FDA doing it is the FDA has been a chaotic mess of governmental corruption and failure to do oversight where it needed to do oversight.
So, you know, we find ourselves swinging back between incompetent extremes of take it all away from the government because they're all a bunch of yahoos or worse and put it all in, you know, and take it away from private hands because you have the perverse incentives on full display.
So, you know, the extremes are both terrible, and we're swimming in among all of the worst from both sides of, you know, traditional left and traditional right.
Right, and very much by design.
So we can use the Posiwood principle.
Purpose of a system is what it does.
The purpose of the FDA is to get drugs to market irrespective of whether they're any good and irrespective of whether they're safe enough for human use.
Is it?
I mean.
So the purpose of the FDA in 10 years ago The stated purpose of the FDA is to protect the public.
But we can infer the actual purpose of the FDA is this other thing based on all the crappy drugs that have gotten to market.
I guess it's hard to apply the Posse-Wood principle in a political framework where the administration has just changed and we don't know what it's currently doing.
Well, let's put it this way.
I think we do know what it's doing and we can sort of read it.
In the fact, you know, I tried to figure out whether or not Vinay Prasad has his fingerprints on this decision about this new Moderna shot.
My guess is he hasn't been there long enough.
He can't have had very much to do with it.
So I don't want to take him to task for it.
I'm sorry, I thought it was Macri who was heading up the FDA.
He is, but Vinay Prasad is heading up the, that's got an acronym I've forgotten, but it's like the...
It's Biologics, which includes vaccines.
So anyway, he's in charge of making sure that the good biologics make it to market and the bad ones don't.
The problem is, as much as I think Vinay Prasad is highly capable, he's a middle ground scrambler.
And, you know, so his position is even different in his official role than it was when he was a private citizen.
The position when he was a private citizen was compromised, to say the least.
It was far better than many, but compromised.
So, in any case, we've got a system.
It's built to bend over backwards to do the bidding of pharma and to prevent the public from being informed as they are facing the question of whether to consent to these things.
But I have six specific points that I think Dark Horse viewers and listeners have the model to understand that allows us to view these shots as they should be viewed.
These new shots, which we know very little about, except that it's sort of a much lower-intensity version of the previous shot, that this one produces a smaller protein.
Yada, yada, yada.
Okay, the first thing is the last two episodes of the Dark Horse Inside Rail podcast have focused on mucosal immunity, which is something you and I have talked about many times here.
But the upshot of this is that if you want to prevent infection from a respiratory virus, you need to induce immunity where that respiratory virus first infects.
It infects a patient.
It infects them at the mucosa.
And the problem with injecting something into a person's arm is that it may generate immunity.
It may generate antibodies, for example, which are overly focused on.
Primarily, your viral immunity is likely to come through T cells, not antibodies.
But nonetheless, one of the games that pharma plays is, "Eureka!
We have an effective shot.
It has demonstrated an ability to produce a robust antibody response." Which doesn't say anything about whether it prevents you from getting the disease.
In fact, one of the things that antibodies can do is they can provide an extra mechanism by which a virus can get into your cells.
So so-called antibody-dependent enhancement is one of the possibilities from a so-called robust antibody response.
But nonetheless, even if the shot does generate a robust antibody response that does prevent viruses from infecting cells, It's doing so in the interstitial spaces in your body, not at the mucosa where it would prevent you from getting the disease.
So already we've got pharma pretending it doesn't know that, putting out yet another shot.
Well, why would they do that?
Why would they put out a shot that isn't going to actually work?
Oh, because it's exactly what you would want if you were pharma, right?
It does not prevent the spread of the infection that you're shot with.
So the disease remains spreading in public, and the garbage about, oh, my God, it's a highly transmissible virus.
Well, so's a cold, right?
We don't all get bent out of shape about colds.
So you might want to induce a response that technically might So the fact that this shot is going to miss the mucosa, at best, if the shot works at all, what it will do is it will block the movement of viruses between cells.
So you might be able to get an efficacy number.
That says, oh, actually, patients who got it are better off than ones that didn't because, well, yeah, they still got sick, but they didn't get as sick, right?
That will be the case.
Or they may even miss a whole set of symptoms because it doesn't pass between cells easily within the body.
Right.
So the point is, if you're pharma, you don't give a fuck about people.
What you do give a fuck about is metrics that can be used to get your product sold.
And so you're going to look for evidence that, oh, well, you know.
This pathology didn't arise, and that's justification enough, because whatever.
So, okay, first point.
The fact that this is not going to produce a robust mucosal immunity is a feature, not a bug if you're pharma, and it's a bug, not a feature if you're a person considering taking it.
Okay, point two.
This shot works.
By the same mechanism that the original shots did.
This is an mRNA, presumably stabilized with pseudouridine, coated in lipid nanoparticle that is going to be taken up by cells because cells are coated in fat and the two will have a chemical affinity.
And what did the original shot do?
Well, actually, it was counterproductive with respect to Whether or not you got COVID.
In fact, you became more likely to get COVID if you'd had the shot.
Now, there are a lot of reasons that that might be, and there may be more than one of them in play.
But one of the ones that we've already seen, which is absolutely terrifying and should have caused an immediate stop to the injection of these shots, but somehow failed to because the system is that broken, was that if you got two of the original shots, it triggered the production of IgG4.
IgG4 is an antibody.
Ig, immunoglobulin, means antibody.
IgG is a class of antibody, a common one.
And IgG4 is a very special class of antibody.
What does it do?
It turns down immunity.
So somehow, this shot, if we are to believe that they tried to make a shot that would prevent people from getting COVID, what they made is a shot that will actually make people more likely to get COVID.
Not through antibody-dependent enhancement, which may also be present, but through the production of this attenuating signal that they are triggering if you've had two or more of these shots.
So, why they would take a shot that produced a paradoxical effect like that and try to reformulate it?
That is a strong indication that they should have pulled the shot and thought, this is a dead end.
Until we know why it does that, until we have some valid scientific reason for believing that some new mRNA shot would not have that effect, there's no way we should be administering this to people.
For one thing, it doesn't even necessarily show up in their trial.
If they're taking naive patients, which I don't know that they are, but if they're taking naive patients, then it might...
So you might well not get the impression that this was a consequence for these shots.
So first point, you need to generate mucosal immunity in this shot.
I ain't gonna do it.
Second point, the first shots were counterproductive.
and because these ones are formulated in the same way, they're likely to be counterproductive too.
Third, this entire...
That if we can show short-term efficacy of some level and short-term safety of some level, that this thing should just be given even though the disease itself is not especially deadly.
In fact, it's not really deadly at all.
Low deadliness, a case fatality rate.
And so even if this shot showed good safety numbers, even if it showed good safety numbers in tests that weren't run by Moderna, even if it showed good efficacy numbers at reducing the severity of the disease, the disease is not especially dangerous.
And you ought to rank at a very high level that you don't know what the long-term consequence of the damn shot is going to be.
And therefore, nobody should be getting it.
Right?
Even if the short-term numbers look good, it doesn't say anything about what the long-term implication is, and it would take decades to find out.
So the idea that for the currently circulating version of COVID, we should be looking for some, you know, fancy new shot, that's insane on its face.
Okay.
Fourth.
Maybe most important.
And the one that Dark Horse viewers and listeners will have heard.
uh described many many times it has also gotten a tremendous amount of very garbagey low-level pushback these shots by their design having nothing to do with the content of the transcript which is the thing that's been changed here these mrna shots have a fatal flaw in their design that fatal flaw is they have no targeting mechanism the shots They flow around the body.
They do not stay in the injection site.
They flow around the body in the lymph.
If you're unlucky, and following CDC guidance, they do not aspirate the syringe to see if they've landed in a vein.
You may get a bolus of the stuff intravenously injected.
They flow around the body.
They run into cells haphazardly around the body.
They are taken up by those cells, and when they are taken up, the cells produce this foreign protein.
Which gets exported to their surface.
What happens when a cell of yours starts producing a foreign protein?
Your immune system is programmed to recognize any cell that does what I just said, that it translates this foreign protein and shows it on its surface.
Your body treats those cells as virally infected and it destroys them.
That is the program because they look to be virally infected and in this case they effectively are.
They're infected by this gene therapy.
That means your body is going to do damage to your cells that have successfully done what this shot has programmed them to do.
Now that damage could be acute or it could be widely distributed and therefore subclinical.
Meaning you don't notice a system.
You've just had some, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of cells destroyed by your own immune system because they were behaving as if they'd been commandeered by a virus.
That is not good for you.
The idea that you should allow Moderna to give you a product that is going to produce that effect in order to fend off COVID, which it won't, it might reduce COVID.
The idea that for such a meager benefit, you're not protecting yourself from getting the disease.
You're not protecting people in your environment from getting the disease from you.
What you're doing is you're protecting some of your cells from other cells that have already been infected at best.
The idea that you would accept that meager benefit at the cost of your own immune system attacking your cells, that's insane.
There is no meager.
It's just pure garbage.
Now, I want to return to that.
This is, I have argued many times, the explanation for why we see myocarditis associated with the mRNA shots.
My claim is going to be two things.
One, myocarditis is misleading as a descriptor.
It's misleading for one reason I've said many times, which is myocarditis means inflammation of the heart.
It's a symptom, not a pathology.
The pathology that the shots are producing, which we see manifest as myocarditis, is heart damage.
These shots are actually creating wounds in your heart.
Those wounds cause your heart to become inflamed, which is the thing that we then diagnose.
But a wounded heart is a problem.
Not only is it a vulnerability while it's wounded, but even after it's no longer wounded, at best it has scarred over.
You're taking your lifetime heart capacity and you're destroying it, not to prevent yourself from getting COVID, mind you, but to prevent your COVID from getting between your cells.
That is not a reasonable trait.
So the one thing is myocarditis means Inflammation.
It is a proxy, in this case, for heart damage, which is extremely serious, inherently so.
And, hold on a second.
Oh, here's the other reason.
Let's say we are adding this to the dark horse model that we've built up.
Not only is myocarditis misleading because it's a symptom, not a pathology, but myocarditis, when you hear that some Drug or biologic or whatever they're calling them is causing damage or inflammation to the heart.
What you should infer is that very likely that vaccine or biologic or drug or whatever it is, is actually doing body-wide damage, which we discover in the heart because the heart is so unique and so sensitive and so poorly capable of repairing itself.
So, when you hear, oh, this thing damages the heart, it's not like it's seeking out the heart.
It's damaging tissues across the body, most of which you're not aware of, but you're eroding your lifetime capacity to maintain your tissues.
You are accelerating the aging of the entire body, and the heart is where we notice that, right?
That's the thing that should trigger you.
Because it has a low repair capacity.
Yes.
Which I don't think you said here yet.
Yeah, because the heart has...
It scars over at best, which is certainly better than an open wound, but it is not the equivalent of the heart tissue you lost.
Those things with higher repair capacity, the repair is not free.
I think that is what is implied in what you're saying here, and you've certainly said it many other times, many other places, but we can see damage to the heart first because it has low repair capacity and so shows wounds earlier.
And those tissues, like epithelial tissue, is maybe at the opposite end of repair capacity.
We expect that both our skin and the lining of our guts are constantly sloughing cells because that is part of the design of those organs, of those tissues.
But none of them, as you discovered with your senescence and telomere and cancer work, none of them have infinite repair capacity.
So all incidents of repair take something from you even if you can't recognize or in any way feel the cost now.
It means that you will be able to repair yourself less in the future.
If you're lucky, you never get to the end of that particular cell line that you've spent some of.
But every cell line is finite.
No cell line is immortal.
With a couple of weird exceptions.
With a couple of weird exceptions that all come with a cancer risk.
Right.
um So yes, very well said.
The point is you're stealing from your future self, your ability to maintain your tissues, which means even if you feel like you fully recovered in the present, the point is what you did is you borrowed from your ability to repair down the line.
And as Heather said, hopefully you never get to the end of the line.
And in many tissues, you never will.
And at some tissue, you ultimately will.
And it will take you out if nothing else does first.
So it's not a place that you should be borrowing lightly.
Anytime you hear myocarditis or, oh, this drug seems to do heart damage in some patients, that's their way of failing to tell you, oh, this drug is toxic across the body, and it's so troubling when it happens in the heart, we've had to acknowledge it.
That's the trick.
Okay, point five.
The reason that we are talking about shots for COVID Is that a very successful psychological operation was deployed that spooked the public and the medical establishment into thinking that COVID was something more than it was.
When COVID was finally acknowledged to have arrived in North America, it was after the system had been primed with videos of people literally keeling over and dropping dead in China, videos which later turned out to be fraudulent.
So, what you had was a system in which the expectation of the seriousness of COVID was then cause for the system to go into high gear when COVID finally arrived.
Now, am I arguing that COVID is not a serious disease?
No.
It is a non-fatal disease.
The case fatality rate is low, and the people who die of it are people who were very sick otherwise.
What we saw was a certain number of people got pulled forward weeks or months, people who were hovering near death anyway.
But in general, COVID, as insane as it is that it was allowed to be created in a lab and that it was allowed to escape through whatever mechanism, as crazy as that is, it is not a highly dangerous disease in which you should be willing to run some sort of a profound gamble in order to avoid another So,
on all of those bases, what you've got, effectively, is Moderna rescuing people from an irrational fear that was cultivated in them by a system out of control.
All right.
The final point of my sixth, and I think in some sense it is where the rubber meets the road, where the whole model comes together.
We've got a criminal industry that has in front of it what I have called the game of pharma.
The game of pharma is one in which, having nothing to do with COVID, pharma always faces the same problem.
It has a molecule that it owns, has intellectual property rights over that has some plausible impact on some medical condition.
Some of these things may be great drugs.
Most of them are just plausible stories that don't turn out to be true or don't turn out to be worth the risk or the harm.
So the game of pharma is how do you portray competing remedies, including long-established drugs or Things that aren't drugs at all.
How do you prevent competing remedies from looking effective enough?
How do you make competing remedies look more dangerous than they actually are?
How do you make your drug look safer than it actually is?
How do you make your drug look more efficacious than it actually is?
Right?
That's the trick.
You need to make the competing things look bad.
You need to make your thing look good.
And then that's the sales pitch.
And then the advanced version of the game.
Is that once you've made your thing look sufficiently good and safe, you get it declared the standard of care for something.
Or you get it declared, you get it put on the vaccine schedule or something else.
You get the officials to push the thing and in fact to threaten anybody who refuses to recommend it to their patients with having their licenses removed or whatever.
Okay, so that's the game of pharma.
And the problem is most...
Pharma products are going to be harmful.
It's very hard to improve the functioning of a human body.
And even when the human body isn't functioning especially well because it's sick, the human body is very used to confronting diseases, both known and unknown.
And it has...
If you understood them, you'd regard them as miraculous.
They really are.
The immune system uses evolution to learn what a pathogen looks like on the scale of hours to days so that it can fend off this never-before-seen infection without you having to do anything.
That's an amazing capability.
It's hard to beat that.
It's very hard to introduce some chemical into a system that's going to improve on what nature already Endowed you with.
So, you know, how are you going to make a profit when you've got all of these competing drugs?
A lot of them are out of patent.
Their safety profile is well understood.
You know, it would be a very sleepy industry if you were forced to only bring safe and effective things to market.
You know, it'd be very rare that we got a new safe and effective drug.
But there are other ways to do it.
And in this case, Let us add to the game of pharma the idea that what we all learned during COVID, what we should have intuited, but what we all learned is that there are a tremendous number of statistical tricks that you can play in order to make things look more effective than they are.
And there are similar tricks that you can use to make harms disappear, to attenuate the signal that we should be reading that says, oh, this is a very dangerous thing to be introducing into the body.
You can silence that safety signal through statistical trickery.
So what do we have here?
We've got a shot that is greatly reduced in Now, you may have heard me say before that these monsters who did this to us screwed up.
That if they had delivered a shot that didn't have any active ingredient and they just claimed that there was mRNA in it and that it was causing your immune system to learn this.
New formula and fight off COVID.
They could have just used statistical trickery to pretend that it had worked.
Especially given that the most compliant are most likely to be youngish women, both of which parameters make you less likely to suffer bad effects from COVID.
Right.
And so you would have the vaccinated population being, on average, a healthier population that would be more resistant to COVID entirely outside of the role of the vaccine.
Totally.
You could use healthy vaccinee bias and other variants of that theme to create the impression that the shot had been very effective at controlling.
Maybe it rescued civilization from the deadly pandemic, which would have, you know, caused mayhem to...
You could pretend that.
And of course, if it had been saline to begin with, there would have been no safety signal.
And all of those of us who were like, hey, wait a minute, you're going to hijack our cells?
How do you know that that's safe?
Here's a list of things that could go wrong.
It could be cancer.
It could be autoimmunity.
It could be neuropathy, you know.
And yet somehow if they'd done that, that kind of fraud is absolutely Not that most of the populists could discover it, but once that fraud was discovered, unlike the various kinds of fraud and corruption that have actually happened, which make very difficult stories to tell, that kind of fraud, there was nothing in that thing,
they gave you nothing, that is obvious and everyone's brain can immediately latch onto that.
So it would have been a riskier move only at the narrative level.
Well, I'm not so sure about that.
And frankly, you know, I've painted a cartoon version of the strategy, right?
You literally put nothing in the shot except saltwater.
And then Kevin McKernan starts testing the shots.
He's like, hey, there's nothing in here, right?
That's how that story would have unfolded.
And you're right that, you know, I don't know that it would have changed anything, right?
Kevin McKernan certainly found frightening levels of DNA, including the SV40 promoter, which is cancer-reducing.
How many Americans, like, oh yeah, SV40 promoter?
Well, right.
As opposed to, there's nothing in there.
They lied to you.
Right.
Now, there's SV40 promoter in there.
It shouldn't have been in there at all.
Therefore, there was clear evidence that they lied to you.
You lost me an SV40 promoter.
I don't know what you're talking about.
It sounds science-y, but I got these other science-y types over here who are telling me it's safe, so I'm going to go with them.
Okay.
This is perfect.
I agree with your complaint about my cartoon scenario, that if it had been truly empty, then that is too provable for comfort.
It's not, I'm not, my argument is not a too provable for comfort argument.
My argument is people can track that as a narrative.
It makes for two, it's like Marvel Universe level comic.
Perfect.
Okay, so what's the solution that takes advantage of my clever strategy of delivering an inert shot so that it doesn't have a safety signal but doesn't allow that?
You reduce it to 20% of the original.
Yeah, there you go.
You cut it down.
And let's put it this way.
These people, they spend a lot of time mocking homeopathy.
Is that what that word is?
Yeah.
So I have to tell you, the entire number six, like this may be the most, and I'm like, no, I feel like what you've written over there is homeoplasia closed toes.
I have no idea what it is.
Again, you never mentioned the word until now.
Okay, I'm just gonna say that no one else can see this, but I'm looking at your notes going, no clue how that, Right.
That's what I've written down.
But you've just connected the dots.
Okay, you did by saying out loud, It says homeopathy.
Homeopathy, yes.
Sure it does.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes, Heather's invoking homoplasty here is a matter of some phylogenetic trauma that she experienced in graduate school.
But...
You're invoking homeoplasia, which you didn't do, is your trauma.
We have a disagreement about homeoplasia.
Yes, we do.
Which no one who's listening right now cares about.
Has an idea what we're talking about.
Yeah.
But okay, let's go back to the homeopathy.
So the trick here is you take a very, very dangerous shot that had a very profound safety signal, which is an ironic term for a shot that...
But, okay, you take a very dangerous shot, and the question is, can you reduce the level of harm low enough that you can then cover it with your statistical games, right, so that you can make the harm disappear below the cheat threshold?
And it's an analogous situation to during the election.
Can you bring the level of loss that Kamala Harris is going to experience down low enough that whatever cheating you can do during the election could overwhelm it?
So in this case, you've got a threshold, a statistical threshold that pharma can cheat and hide.
They've failed to hide the harm.
Of the mRNA shots in the original form because the harm was so profound.
There are so many vaccine injured.
They vaccinated so many people.
We know that the clock started in 2021, and you can just see the signal.
It takes off.
It even separates it from COVID.
You know, they did a lot of shoving people between categories, but we have 2020 where people had COVID, and they didn't have the shots.
You can compare those things.
Oh, my God.
Horrendous safety signal.
Well, now they've come up with a mechanism.
To radically reduce the level of harm.
So maybe it's below the cheat threshold.
Well, we don't even know what they're going to deliver.
Given that what Kevin McKernan did find out was that what we thought was in the vials was not a good match for what was in the vials, right?
I don't know what they're going to deliver.
Maybe their real game is to...
They must have solved the mRNA problem.
mRNA is back on the table.
And given that this is Moderna, whose entire business model, I believe, is mRNA, that makes sense.
Because if it was Pfizer, you might expect them to subtly walk away.
And maybe they are, because we haven't heard anything about a new Pfizer shot.
But Moderna doesn't have anything else.
Their bank of insights is not deep.
I think this is a good point.
Yeah.
So you could imagine meetings in the depths of Moderna in which the question is, how do you rescue the business from the widespread awareness or the dawning awareness of just how much harm was done by the initial COVID shots?
What you need is maybe they're gaming the FDA and Kennedy.
Maybe the idea is Kennedy has now said, no, we're going to run a real test.
And that means that if the test comes out smelling like a rose because, frankly, there ain't nothing in it or not enough in it to matter, then it'll be like, oh, maybe.
Maybe we judged mRNA tech too much.
Maybe it was the spike protein all along.
That's going to be their trick.
Remember?
We've said that many times too.
So one of your predictions here is that the new one won't have spike?
Well, it has smaller amounts.
So if they take a smaller piece of the spike, then the complaint that many of us have had, which is like, hey, you're taking this bioactive molecule that interacts with anything with the ACE2 receptor on it.
Why would you do that?
But if it's still all we have to do is use the platform without spike, if the new one still produces spike.
Yeah, but if it produces a piece of the spike, then the objection that, hey, it was a mistake to use the spike does vanish if it comes out with...
I think it vanishes, but I see that it runs in that direction.
Let's put it this way.
If I thought that these people were...
That's believable at a narrative level, at a scientific level.
But I don't think that, you know, these people aren't playing it straight.
And as you point out, they have everything to lose if we come to understand that the mRNA platform is...
If you can't rescue it, it doesn't matter what the mRNA transcript has on it.
It literally doesn't matter.
All it has to be is a foreign protein and it will trigger your body to attack your cells and it will rob you of life and in bad cases it will damage your heart and there's no excuse for doing that.
A disease from which we naturally recover easily.
All right.
I think that's all I had here, but I do think it is a powerful demonstration of both the power of first principles thinking, which allows us to figure out a lot here, and the power of the model that you and I at great length have wrestled into existence on Dark Horse.
There are actually similarities in some of that to the little story I wanted to tell about what I saw with regard to the Imane Caliph story this week.
So, ultimately, although this appears to be about the Olympics, men and women's sports, disorders of sexual development, trans ideology, the reason, which is why I was sort of wading into it, because when he beat...
when he won gold to beat women up in uh in paris last year i wrote about it and i reposted that this week but some of the response that i got from a separate tweet thread was at first baffling and then super instructive in terms of how people respond online and how you know just as we have for too long but
The blind spots of the left, because we come from the left, to nuanced arguments that trigger people into having responses that don't make sense, given what has been said, that's what I'm seeing on the flip side.
And I think I am less immediately able to predict when that's going to happen on the right, because I don't come from the right, and so I'm less familiar with the sort of the tropes that live in people's heads over there.
I feel like I saw exactly the same kind of thing on the right this week.
I'm just a total misunderstanding of what I was doing among a small fraction of the audience.
Okay, so I'm aiming to leave this Algerian boxer who took home gold is male.
It was clear to many of us at the time back in last summer, and there have been some test results that were leaked this week that say, yep, he's XY.
So he's got a disorder of sexual...
He was almost certainly born, and there's some disagreement about this.
In some ways, I don't really care about these details, but I am going to imagine for the moment that he was almost certainly born with maybe some ambiguity, but basically looking like a girl, and thus in very gender-restrictive Algeria, raised as a girl and not a boy.
Whereas, you know, if this had happened in the US, at least in some families in some parts of the US, it wouldn't have mattered as much, right?
Raised as a girl, puberty hits, and he suddenly is revealed to the entire world as a he as opposed to a she.
And this has got to have been painful, baffling, all of this, and yet no longer ambiguous, right?
So, So, actually, let's, if you would, Jen, show, put up the thread that I Posted.
I'm just going to read the thread and then show some of the reactions to it.
So I said, being assigned male or female at birth does not make you that thing.
Sex exists outside of human understanding of it, and sometimes, rarely, we are wrong.
You are already, from the moment of conception, male or female.
Normal development produces a baby that is easily recognizable as one sex or the other.
Development is not always normal, however, and then sometimes we get it wrong.
Such was the case with the Maine Caliph.
Caliph is the Algerian boxer who beat women to take home gold in the Paris Olympics, despite the fact that he is a man.
Caliph seems to have a disorder of sexual development.
This means that when Caliph was born, he appeared to be female and lived as if he was a girl until puberty hit.
Presumably he and everyone around him truly thought that he was female.
But male puberty transformed Caliph's external experience into that of a man, which is in fact what he now is.
Just as girls become women, boys become men.
As much compassion as we might have for the younger Caliph, who no doubt went through a baffling and painful puberty, we owe the adult Caliph, a man who takes pleasure in beating up women, no compassion at all.
Observe, and here's just a screenshot from the Paris Olympics last week, observe Caliph celebrating on the shoulders of his coach.
Algerian women do not ride around on the bodies of unrelated Algerian men in public.
At the very least, both Caliph and his coach knew then that he was a man.
And I think the last thread in this is coming next.
Being asked to ignore the truth to protect someone's feelings is an obviously gameable position.
And then I link to the Natural Selections post that I reposted and added just a little bit to the top this week.
And, you know, it's got a couple thousand likes and a lot of, what's it called?
Retweets?
Retweets.
Yeah.
And such.
But it's also had a surprising amount of clear misunderstandings of what my point was.
And so you can show my screen here now if it's possible.
But it's hard for me to imagine how you would misunderstand your point.
That's what I thought.
But here I'm just starting by showing, reminding people of the first tweet in the thread.
Being assigned male or female at birth does not make you that thing.
Sex exists outside of human understanding of it, and sometimes rarely we are wrong.
So I think what triggered people on the right is the use of the term assigned at birth, which I used with intention here, and I'll get to that.
So I get, oh, shut up, you fucking idiot.
Oh, now I get it.
Yes, it does.
Everyone, everyone ever, including you, no exceptions, had one mother and one father.
Biology matters.
Fuck off.
Nobody is reading this bullshit.
Quackery at its best.
Retard.
I find retards.
What a whopper this one is, lol.
To its credit, whatever it is, the I find retards account did not find me.
And there were a few requests and it failed to respond.
Nonsense.
Fucking hell.
Stop.
Stop before the world loses any more marbles.
You are a disgrace.
This is retarded.
I thought you were a biologist.
Dopes like you are ruining science.
And this is not all of them by any means, right?
But some of the more nuanced disagreement is we are not assigned sex at birth.
Sex is observed.
Not assigned, just simply observed.
It's really easy.
And I feel like I'm having my own words fed back to me, right?
And it's not that I invented that, but obviously.
But this is something I've said over and over and over again.
So someone who did not misunderstand me, but had some nuance, said, absolutely.
By the way, I detest the phrase assigned at birth.
No one assigns sex at birth.
It's not like there's a sorting hat from Harry Potter making this determination.
So I said to him, I agree.
When my point has been to discuss why the phrase is both wrong and wielded as a weapon, I use observed at birth, because that is what actually happens.
Here, though, I wanted to highlight the fact that reality and human interpretation of reality are not inherently in sync.
And so I want us to talk about epistemology some here, about both how people jump to conclusions and how they're triggered, and people on the right are apparently just as easily triggered as people on the left.
But also how it is that we actually make claims of truth.
And so just one more person who I think misunderstood me.
Nobody is assigned sex.
It's objectively observed.
Occasionally guys will have internal nuts and a blind pouch.
It looks like vaginas.
So sure, sometimes the observation is not adequate, hence DNA or biochemical analysis.
But it's his use of the term objectively observed here that I wanted to focus on.
And so you can either keep that up or take my screen off at the moment.
The idea of objective observation isn't exactly part of What is at stake here, right?
And this is something that I, as not only an evolutionary biologist, but as an animal behaviorist, have spent a lot of time thinking about, teaching, considering, what is the nature of observation?
How can we separate observation from interpretation?
And how can we know when we have done so successfully?
We can never do so completely successfully, right?
Our ability to observe, and I'm using that in the sort of sensulato way, like observe not just through your eyes, but through any of your senses, to hear, to taste, to feel, to smell, is of course coming in through the biases that our senses have.
And so an individual human being can never have complete objectivity.
Right.
So two kinds of biases.
systems all have adaptive biases, biases that are built in because they make you more effective and they also have limits.
So they're going to be biases that aren't serving you, but are nonetheless inherent to the modality.
Well, you're not a bee.
You can't see into the ultraviolet.
And so, yes, it does.
But your limited senses in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum don't reveal to you what the actual intended target of that flower has revealed to the bee in the case of my example.
So, I think, you know, we have presumably mostly Mostly people, I hope, and mostly good people who are just triggered into both reacting to a phrase that actually has validity precisely under those conditions when the fallible human observer,
who is the adult at the presence of the birth of a baby, being usually something more than the mother, you know, a midwife, a doctor, whatever it is, making their best estimate because usually, as I say in the thread, usually it's obvious.
Usually, you know, even in cases of, you know, slight, you know, slight ambiguity, it's still clear.
And we are all I think all of us know at this point that there are of course there have been tragic ambiguous cases where a decision was made and surgery entailed and people were forced to live as the sex that they were not and it was it created incredible dysphoria because actually someone was forced through surgical mutilation as an infant into the sex that they actually were not because there was enough ambiguity that um and you know this is this is not happening now i don't think um but you know but those sorts of things have happened but in I don't know how old
Amain Khalif is, but call him 20. You know, in 2005, when he was born in very conservative, very Islamic Algeria, with, you know, what looked like, I presume, not very ambiguous genitalia that were nevertheless completely misleading with regard to the particular sex he was because he has a disorder of sexual development.
The doctors slotted him in.
to being female, and that's what he thought he was.
And so that was a sex assigned at birth, but it doesn't mean that he ever was that sex, right?
So that's why the use of that word here, and what is And that is part of what is driving us apart.
That is part of the chaos that we are living through right now.
That, yes, we are all familiar with the crazy language policing that the wokes on the left are forcing us into or we are refusing.
But this is the same thing on the right.
I simultaneously now understand why they were triggered.
But the irony here is if you use their modality, you see the exact problem.
Because their point is, no, we observe sex at birth.
Well, they tried that in this case.
And what they ended up doing was assigning a birth sex, which is not a match for the person's biology.
So in any case, the point is observed didn't work.
If you think, oh no, we just observed that, stop saying we assign it, then the point is no.
In this case, what happened was a wrong assignment.
well and so and you know someone said oh we determine it it's like okay well i don't Actually, in biology, we use the term determination with regard to sex to mean a very different thing.
And what makes you male or female is what gametes you can or will or would but for an abnormality produce.
But what determines what sex you are is, in the case of mammals and birds and a few other clades, your chromosomes.
And in the case of like, you know, turtles, it's the particular temperature you are, you were at during a particular critical developmental period.
And so the idea of the human being determining it, actually that, that feels much more wrong as a word to use.
But here we are stuck in human language where what we're trying to, trying to,
what, 8 billion people on this planet at this point, and a lot of endocrine disruptors, just to use one example of reasons that we might have ambiguities in humans being born at this point, there are going to be cases where it's not clear.
And so observation is not sufficient precisely because normal development isn't as common as it used to be.
There are more people being born now than there used to be.
And our senses are limited in terms of what we can see.
So I want to revive a point.
I don't think we've talked about it in years, but something we used to discuss with some regularity, which is the postmoderns, they have a strongest point.
It's all week after this one.
But the strong point is there is no objective observation, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Your cognition, there are biases in your perception.
All of these things have biases built into them.
That's what we have science for.
Science is the proper remedy for that.
Science will allow you to take a biased perception and discover that it is biased by running a test that forces you to confront some incongruity.
But nonetheless, the idea that our perceptions have an inherent bias built into them is true.
The postmoderns then extrapolate everything from that, including that there is no reality, that effectively there is only perception, and it's biased, and so our bias is as good as your bias and all of that.
Total nonsense.
But it is worth recognizing that the right-minded, correctly-minded, scientifically-oriented people acknowledge the bias in the perceptions, and that is the Most important reason that you need science.
Yes.
You don't need it for things that are I don't need science to prove that there is a glass of water in front of me.
My perceptual biases are not significant enough to disrupt my ability to see that.
And indeed, one of the more banal failures of modern science is the publication of papers that test truly obvious hypotheses.
Truly obvious hypotheses.
Yes, to put another line on the CV or because the people running them are so dumb that it's not obvious to them, even if it should be.
But yes, that is a very common.
Science corrects that subjectivity, and that's what's necessary.
But it does make me wonder if in modern times, given what we understand and given the horror of the occasional case in which somebody is raised like this guy in the wrong sex and it causes chaos, If effectively the observation of the obstetrician is a hypothesis and that there ought to be a test.
Now, the tests aren't perfect either because biology is amazing.
And I discussed with Michael Malice when I was on his program this week, we were talking about the situation I got into in grad school where I almost failed out of grad school because in my...
Calatricids being New World monkeys that include marmosets and tamarins.
Marmosets and tamarins.
I felt certain that these had to be identical twins, and then I went looking, and it turned out they weren't identical twins in any way.
The committee got frustrated with me that I couldn't quite let go of the identical twin issue, even though the evidence said it wasn't true.
But the punchline of the story turned out something even more.
My intuition was right.
They were behaving like identical twins for a very good reason that didn't happen to be identical twins.
It was that they were chimeras, which meant that you had two twins that were not identical that had been intermixed at the cellular level.
Specifically chimeric testes.
Right, and they had chimeric testes.
I mean, it should at least be the name of a band.
Yes, it should be, and we would be among its very small number of dedicated fans.
Yeah, it depends on the music, I think.
I'd like to think so.
But anyway, the point is, even something like a, we observe, the obstetrician observes sex at birth, a karyotype is then the test of that hypothesis.
You know, a karyotype can still be misleading in a small number of types of DSTs.
Right.
And in fact, I think this has been seen in amniocentesis issues where sometimes you get.
There have been some anomalies.
But anyway, nothing is perfect, but you can reduce the uncertainty spectacularly by doing something like following up your...
So you can see in humans that 23rd position, are you XX or are you XY?
That's what a karyotype reveals.
Yeah, exactly.
So that would be good.
If you had a chimera, you might get two different karyotypes, and that might tell you something.
But anyway, this hasn't been possible for that long, but it's now so cheap that maybe, I don't know, when a child is born, do they test their blood type?
Don't remember.
Yeah, I think they don't.
But anyway, it might be, I don't know, I hate to be recommending a procedure that doesn't exist.
But mistakes here are so profoundly costly in at least the life of the person that is misassigned that any ambiguity at all should result in a karyotype.
Yeah, that's probably true.
And of course, you know, who knows what happens in Algeria, which is, you know, Like, if this had been in the United States, this would have played out very differently.
The United States might well have still let this dude punch women, because that's now considered, like, the pinnacle of feminism to celebrate dudes punching women because they claim they're women.
You know, that's its own kind of insanity.
I don't see any evidence the Algerians at the point that they took this guy to the Olympics were confused.
They just thought it was cool to let him punch women.
It's a totally different kind of misogyny that we got going on there.
But I guess the fact that people across the entire spectrum of politics are triggered enough to respond right away and just get right in it.
So I didn't also show there's a number of people like, hold up, guys, like read the whole thing.
thread, like you got it wrong.
And it has been very fascinating to see it play out with the caveat that when you don't know how many of these people are actually real people, it makes it less interesting.
But if I take this as, oh, this got a lot of engagement, the overwhelming Is that it?
Are you being triggered by someone who I don't know who it might be, having misunderstood it, and that's why you're confused?
Or is the term assigned at birth just in your head now that you're so certain this is something I never need to investigate again, and therefore anyone who uses it must be an idiot?
Like, where was the error in the case of people who say that I think that he And at the very least, regardless of where your error was, there was an error of certainty.
There was an error of imagining that we can absolutely know some things by objective observation.
And as a scientist, I want us to be able to objectively observe, and specifically as an animal behaviorist.
Boy, is it harder.
Like, is it ever harder, right, to be watching organisms in which you are trying to understand what they're doing and you're using your human understanding because what other lens do you have?
Like, that is literally the only lens that you have with which to understand, you know, frog behavior or primate behavior, whatever it is.
And then trying to, for, you know, days, weeks, months, depending on what you're watching and what their life cycles are and all of this, try to just record what it is actually that you're seeing.
As opposed to what you think it means.
That is hard.
And for most things in life, you don't do that because you don't have time and you don't have interest and there's just so many things that you're going to pay that much attention to.
But doing it at least a few times for a few things that you care really deeply about so you recognize, oh.
And the, you know, first several months of notes, I'm trying really hard not to say it's a fight.
It's a fight.
And I watch myself sort of fail.
I'm like, nope, I didn't know that that was a fight.
Okay, they've been belly to belly like sumo wrestlers, these little frogs for 45 minutes.
I'm still not going to say it's a fight, even though I know it's two males because I've marked them.
My goodness.
Still not going to claim it until I've seen so many of them that I can have greater and greater confidence in what I think I know.
You don't jump to conclusions.
You cannot jump to conclusions, and no matter what you think you know, the certainty is likely to lead you astray.
All right.
Here's what you can do and should do.
I know this sounds ridiculous.
You should jump to hypotheses.
Yeah.
Well, not, not, not, You should be keeping track of all the hypotheses you have separately.
No, no.
I would argue that there is nothing negative about entertaining a hypothesis as long as you're clear in your head.
Keep it separate.
Keeping separate set of books sounds exactly wrong, but literally...
Here's what I saw.
And then the thought occurs to you, huh, could it be a this?
And you put it in that last column.
It doesn't affect what's in the column about what you recorded about what actually happened.
But leaping to hypotheses, this is one of the reasons it's really not catching on and it's really annoying to me that it isn't.
But yeah, hypothesis is a weird term.
It's arcane.
The importance of having that status of that is a hypothesis separately categorized in your mind from here are the things I think I know and here's a mystery I have no guess for, right?
It is a hypothesis that tells me exactly what I don't know yet about it, which is whether or not it's true.
Well, I've got a theory about why people don't like hypotheses.
Really?
You have a theory.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well.
There's one thing I know is that it's the only explanation that's left if you've got a theory.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, hypotheses are more cumbersome.
I mean, I think you're right.
I think that people are...
I have a hard time with the word because the theory has become the word that everyone uses, even though that's really not what it means.
but it also hypothesized And I think that even if people don't mind being held to a standard, they may feel like, "Well, I don't know what I'm doing here.
I don't want to make that claim." And so I think it actually seems like theory is a lesser claim when it, in fact, is not.
I agree.
It's exactly the opposite.
But it does feel like if you say "hypothesis," You're putting on airs.
It's exactly the opposite.
You are saying what you don't know about it.
And with the point you say theory, you've actually said something radical.
And if it's not that the evidence is overwhelming that this thing is true, then you've said something unjustified.
Yeah, it's a good point.
All right.
All right.
I'm out.
You're out.
All right.
I had two last pieces.
They're relatively short, but I think important.
First one, I wanted to talk.
Just briefly about the Glenn Greenwald situation, and I wanted to describe a position that is not really on the map, as far as I know, how I think people should feel about what's going on.
And I will give a brief recap.
A video of Glenn Greenwald, a pink video of Glenn Greenwald emerged.
On Twitter, tweeted by a male prostitute with whom he seemed to be interacting.
People have reported that the video was then retweeted by Glenn's account and then deleted, if I understand the claim correctly.
Glenn has not denied the authenticity of the video.
He says he didn't tweet it or delete it.
He has promised to explain what's going on.
And so far...
But other than that, we don't have a lot of extra detail.
And there's been a battle about what to think about any of this.
And I will just say, one of the things that Glenn has said, So Glenn put out a statement on Twitter.
I don't know if we want to read the whole thing, but it says...
Some were distorted and others were not.
They were published without my knowledge or consent and its publication was therefore criminal.
Though we do not yet know exactly who is responsible, we are close to knowing and the motive was maliciously a maliciously political one.
As for the content of the videos, I have no embarrassment or regret about them.
The videos depict consenting adults engaged in intimate actions in their private life.
But basically the camps looking at this come down to horror at the content of the videos and Extrapolation to Greenwald something moral from these things.
A lot of extrapolation.
A lot of extrapolation.
And then other people saying what happens between consenting adults behind closed doors isn't anybody else's business.
And I think that there is room for a kind of nuance here and that it actually strengthens the position that I think we should hold, which is closer to the consenting adults position, but it's not identical.
when people's sex videos have been leaked, gone and watched it.
And so he's perplexed, and I think he infers something about what it is that causes people to go look at these things.
I did not go look at it.
It certainly wouldn't have been my instinct.
I don't think you've watched it.
So anyway, I agree with him in that regard.
Like, why, you know, to the extent that one of these things leaks, it's not really...
But anyway, here's what I think is true.
One, I think the formulation that what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors is none of our business, that that is right in one way and wrong in another way, and that it is important that we have these two things taxonomized separately.
Private behavior does have implications.
For the wider public.
The idea that what people normalize behind their bedroom doors has no implication for the outside world is not likely to be true.
For one thing, there is a reason that human beings engage in narrative, fantasy, etc.
And the point is, it alters the content of the mind in ways that have implications for behavior.
It wouldn't have evolved if it didn't.
It is too simple to think that consenting adults behind closed doors is none of our business.
Oh, go ahead.
There's also the issue that, and this has mostly come from the left, the idea of consent has become so mandatory in explicit terms that consent is now this linguistic thing that puts the brakes on actual sexual exploration.
And I was telling you, I read an essay this week in which many of the players are anonymized by a woman who has been in two relationships where she gave verbal consent to things that were not good for her.
And she knew at the time.
And she continued to give verbal consent because what the man would do was say, is this okay?
How about if I put my hands around your neck here?
Is the tighter grip, you know, okay?
And I'm not...
And it has damaged sexual behavior in private as well.
I agree.
And as you pointed out when we discussed this between you and me, we've got a male prostitute here.
So there's a whole...
There's a transactional thing, and how you end up as a prostitute, you know, you may consent to the behavior for economic reasons, but what led you to that, you know, may well not have been a free choice.
So, in any case, I don't think it's as simple as what happens between consenting adults.
Behind closed doors is fine.
However, I do think that we are effectively obligated to treat that as the case because no other standard is tolerable.
In other words, what you don't want is the government deciding that it is in a position to dictate what consenting adults do behind closed doors, etc.
There's a difference between the moral perspective.
Yeah, there is actually something to be concerned about people normalizing.
Choking is the easy example.
Choking is, yeah.
Normalizing sexual violence and things like that.
But from the perspective of, is it worse to have the government deciding, here's a list of tolerated behaviors and stuff like that?
Of course.
Of course it's worse.
Yeah.
At a formal level, we have to do that.
But then the more important thing is this.
Glenn Greenwald is a completely unique phenomenon, and he falls under another rubric, something...
It may have been Facebook, which I haven't interacted with in a very long time, but with Julian Assange.
And those stories did not stand up to scrutiny.
What I said is that when somebody challenges immense power, they deserve every benefit of every doubt.
And my point here would be, whatever you might think about whatever Glenn Greenwald was doing, In these videos, we don't have a spare Glenn Greenwald.
That what he has been doing journalistically is so profoundly important that we are obligated to defend him in the strongest possible terms because for two reasons.
One, because power is incentivized to Uh, expose and degrade.
And in this case, I suspect to paint a picture that causes us to interpret whatever it is that was seen in those videos as if they have a meaning that would be convenient for power if they had.
So in other words, the idea that he will be portrayed as defective in certain ways is certain in light of the power that he has, um, confronted.
So there's that.
But here's the...
So one point is if you challenge immense power, you deserve every benefit of every doubt and every benefit of every doubt You're advocating for the benefit of the doubt to an extreme.
Right.
And I would say, you know, there's nothing...
This is not about Glenn, but I personally draw a hard line with respect to.
If there are any implication on anybody's part in any of these cases about kids, we're in a whole different league.
But with respect to this, we're talking about clear adults.
We're talking about apparent consent.
That is well enough.
Glenn gets a pass here because he's done a tremendous amount of good.
there's no reason any of us should be parsing anything we see here for that reason.
But the second reason...
Right.
But the second reason comes down to that, which is the way power keeps the little people down.
And I include pretty much everybody you know in the little people.
The way it does that is by exerting many different versions of a game of double standards.
So the idea is you will be exposed to a high level.
That's the basic way that everything is accomplished, that violates the notions of the West and what it is supposed to do.
One of the ways that that is done is through selective enforcement.
We're going to create a law, and then we're going to enforce it against the people we don't like, and we're not going to enforce it against our people.
So that's one version.
The other thing is you've got I don't know what the meaning of Glenn's account having retweeted this thing, apparently, but Glenn, I think, credibly saying he knows nothing about either the tweet or the deletion of the tweet, right?
That could be a lie, but I don't see any reason to believe it is.
It's a very strange lie for a guy like Glenn Greenwald to tell, so I don't think it's likely to be a lie.
I think this is likely to be, oh, somebody has access to something, and they wanted it to appear that Glenn was involved in this story at a level that he wasn't.
So what do we do with the fact that there are very powerful forces that have access to technologies that most of us don't have?
For example, the Pegasus program that was used to commandeer access to people's phones.
If they want to exert a double standard, what they're going to do is they're going to find all of the stuff on the people who are challenging great power, and they're going to make sure that it spills out into public.
And then their own stuff is not going to be spilled out, which leaves an inherent false impression.
Right?
One of the reasons that we are obligated to ignore whatever has come out here about Glenn is that it is not, our minds want to believe that this is a sample of the universe, but it's not a sample.
It's a bias in the universe where, of course, Glenn's sex tapes are more likely to spill out than some establishment person because there are people motivated to find whatever they can on him and have it come out in public so that we will have a gross So, when somebody is playing us by making sure that we have evidence of You know, stuff on these people's part and not those people's part.
They are effectively creating an imbalance in what we intuit as our senses that causes us to feel that way about these people, but not to have an icky feeling about those people.
So the point is, you are morally obligated, in light of what Glenn does for a living, to throw this stuff out because somebody wants you thinking about it, because they want you not to trust Glenn Greenwald.
Right?
And so that's two separate reasons.
And then finally, I would just sum this up as saying, if you want to beat these people, the way you do it is you make sure that when they play games like this, that it backfires.
Read the books they want to burn.
If they want to burn a book, you should want to get a copy and read it.
I'm not saying that book is true, but I'm saying if they want to burn it, you should know why.
Right?
If they want to burn Glenn Greenwald, you should know why.
Maybe you should sign up for his...
I think it's a substack.
Sign up for a substack and read a little bit about what he's saying.
It might tell you who he's pissing off at the level that they would expose his private life this way.
Maybe you should check out his recent interviews or things that might be upcoming that they might have wanted to derail by creating a sex scandal.
Right?
This is that if you want them, It's as simple as that.
Absolutely.
All right.
Okay, so then one last thing, which I'm only bringing in here because it's so timely.
So I have a...
long-running conversation with a friend of ours over what the actual state of Richard Dawkins'mind is.
And, you know, I am, I think it would be well known to our audience that I'm frustrated by Richard Dawkins because he insists that relationships,
When I had my interaction with him in 2018 on stage in Chicago, I was hoping that by presenting him with the evidence that he would understand that he had made an error, and that he would do the right thing, and that he would come around.
Did that happen?
It did not happen.
I know.
Right.
It did not happen.
And what's more, He has done quite the opposite.
And frankly, you know, look, he's entitled to have personal failings as much as anybody.
But I'm saddened and disappointed that somebody who I learned as much from as I learned from Richard Dawkins does not seem to understand the basic principle of scientific mentorship.
Right?
You produce a next generation that comes to understand things that you didn't.
And you should welcome that.
You shouldn't fend that off.
And in this case, he's holding on to what I think is a childish notion that it's as simple as there's no God in the sky, therefore these people are confused and that's all there is to it, when in fact there is a whole lot more to it.
And evolutionarily speaking, what there is to it is pretty damn profound.
So anyway, I'm disappointed not only in his failure to see it, but in his, I think, petty behavior in failing to see it.
And then, so I thought maybe he had sort of, he wasn't man enough to admit that he had changed his position, but he's changed it.
But no, turns out not true.
Here's what he tweeted this morning.
He says, nothing so vividly illustrates the mental infection that is religion.
And he has a picture of the mosque at, this is Mecca, and Muslims all dressed in white, all kneeling towards the rock.
And I was just struck that, you know, it's 2025.
He knows the argument, or at least should, and here he is still pretending that that picture depicts a pathology, which to me is just, it's a preposterous notion.
I mean, if you think about, if I was, I considered doing this, collecting some images of actual pathologies, you know, if I put up an image of, you know, gangrene or a wart, right?
Also, no.
Right.
Or a rabid animal or something.
They look disordered and deranged.
And whatever else you may think about that image, this image, I mean, for one thing, it's a beautiful image, depicting a highly organized behavior of a mysterious origin.
that should be beckoning a guy like Dawkins to understand it.
So your idea is that the actual pathogen, uh, while not, Right.
And that religion does the opposite.
Does the opposite.
And here's the test.
Here's the thing, you know, Richard Dawkins, any day he wants to, can wake up and just run the following thought experiment in order to realize that he's off track.
With respect to a creature that is infected, we understand why they don't just free themselves of the infection.
Because it's difficult.
Because, yeah, to be perfectly immune to the infection would be, So hobbling that it's a state that cannot evolve, so anyway, we run some risk of infection in order to live life, and that means we're sometimes infected, and it results in disorder.
In the case of religious devotion, there are always atheists of every stripe, right?
You've got people who are born into Christian homes who don't believe, Jewish homes don't believe, Muslim homes don't believe.
If this were a pathology, Then the people who were simply like their kin, but free of this pathological belief, they would have an advantage.
And that lack of belief would spread, and it would drive out the devout.
And it never does.
Nope.
So that should tell you that this highly organized thing that does not look like a pathology probably isn't a pathology, which is an invitation.
Right.
If you know, Richard Dawkins would never look at the bower produced by a bower bird and say, oh, my God, the animals got a mental disorder.
It's building structures that don't have a value.
He would say, huh, that must have a value, given that it's not a nest and it doesn't provide food and it takes an awful lot of time for these animals to create and maintain.
And the birds that do it do better than the birds who don't.
Right.
He would say, well...
He would say, in this case, we know it's a response to sexual selection, not natural selection, because the behavior is different between males and females.
But he would never, he wouldn't bother with the thought that it was a pathology because it doesn't pass the smell test.
And neither does it pass the smell test that Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or any of the other long-standing religions are pathologies.
It's just nonsense.
And it's just sad, you know.
He's going to go to his grave believing this absurd thing, when in fact, and here's the irony, the big one at the bottom of this whole thing.
What Richard Dawkins does not understand, it's not that he fails to get evolution.
He's brilliant with evolution.
Until you get off towards humans.
When you get near humans, he doesn't get it.
Why?
Because cultural evolution is playing such a large role.
But Richard Dawkins has actually played a vital role in our ability to understand cultural evolution.
By introducing the rigorous idea of the meme, the analog to the gene in cultural space, he's provided the tool that...
That's just, it's a ridiculous irony.
And there's a part of me that just can't stand it because I know he's not lacking the brainpower to get it.
He's not lacking the education.
He's got everything he needs to get it other than the fact that he's stubborn about religion, I think because...
All right.
I'm going to get off my soapbox now.
All right.
We're coming to you early next week and the week after.
We're going to be here next Tuesday on the Tuesday after that, due to some travel that we both will be doing.
Check us out on Locals.
You have another Patreon call coming up?
Yes, I do.
I think it's Saturday.
Yeah.
And as always, check out the stuff that our sponsors offers.
CrowdHealth.
Right, I only have CrowdHealth.
CrowdHealth, Armour, and Helix, it was.
which are three great sponsors, always.
You're looking at me like...
I've been wondering if now is the time for seal noises, but I know it isn't.
I'm going to wait until we...
Yeah.
How about now?
There it is.
Good.
Okay.
So on that note, I think we're out.
I remember that was a note on that.
Bark.
Vocalization.
Yes, bark.
On that bark.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
